[Margaret Thatcher] was pretending that running a country was like running a household, which she knew wasn't true.

My first career ambitions involved turning into a boy; I intended to be either a railway guard or a knight errant.

I used to think that when I set out that doing the research was enough! But then the gaps would emerge that could only be filled by the imagination. And imagination only comes when you privilege the subconscious, when you make delay and procrastination work for you.

My concern is less the monarchy as such than the attempt of a fading colonial power to hang onto grandeur.

He thinks, I remembered you, Thomas More, but you didn't remember me. You never even saw me coming.

I think I would have been a reasonably good lawyer. I have a faculty for making sense of mountains of information.

The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.